LibreOffice improves software quality with Coverity Scan

SAN FRANCISCO, USA: Coverity Inc., the leader in development testing, announced the results of its latest Coverity ScanÂ™ Project Spotlight, which analyzed the LibreOffice open source project, including defect density and the types of defects identified, as compared to the industry average.

LibreOffice is a Document Foundation project, which began as an offshoot of the OpenOffice open source collaboration suite in 2010. It is the default office suite of the most popular Linux distributions including Novell, Red Hat and Ubuntu, and has the support of the Free Software Foundation (FSF), AMD, Google and Intel. It is also available in more than 112 languages and for a variety of computing platforms, including Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X Tiger and Linux.

LibreOffice joined the Coverity Scan service in October of 2012. Since then, they have leveraged the free development testing service to scan more than 9 million lines of code, and identified more than 4,700 critical defects. To date, they have fixed more than 2,100 high- and medium-impact defects, including pointer dereferences, resource leaks and memory corruptions, and their defect density has dropped from 1.11 to 0.84.

“With open source software reaching mainstream adoption in commercial software development projects, development testing has become a core part of the open source development process to find and fix critical software defects early,” said Jennifer Johnson, chief marketing officer for Coverity. “Our Coverity Scan service is experiencing explosive growth within the open source community, and we applaud LibreOffice, along with all of the open source projects that use our free service, for their commitment to creating and delivering high-quality software.”

The Coverity Scan service continues to gain momentum with the open source community, as it enables developers to easily find and fix defects that further improve the state of open source software quality. Since its introduction, the Coverity Scan service has analyzed more than 300 million lines of open source code for more than 700 open source projects.